The Heart Failure Program project is a resource-related research program to develop new reasoning methods for the application of Artifical Intelligence techniques to medicine for the effort of the SUMEX-AIM community. The context and driving force for this research is the management of heart failure in the intensive care setting. We will: 1) Develop a representational methodology capable of supporting the clinically relevant distinctions of patient state. This representation will utilize the clinically significant qualitative parameter values and will include causal relationships, time dependencies and relations about change. 2) Build a qualitative physiological model of the cardiovascular system using this methodology to act as a store for evolving knowledge of patient state. 3) Explore and develop strategies for determining the appropriate parameter values in the model from input data, reasoning support methods and heuristics for carrying out the diagnostic reasoning with the model, and reasoning support methods and heuristics for carrying out the diagnostic reasoning with the model, and reasoning support methods and heuristics for finding possible therapies and determining their potential consequences. 4) Build around this core a program to assist the physician in exploring his or her understanding of the implications in an individual case. The physician and program will reason together about the case with the physician providing ideas and the program assuring consistent consideration of the implications. 5) Generalize the techniques for use in other medical domains.